As a beginner or long-term site user, you would discover that the continuous usage of WordPress tools and plugins on your website can help you achieve your goal, in creating awareness or selling some products on your website. 

This goal can however be curtailed by the restriction placed on your website to only allow a certain size of file or plugin or theme. This restriction is created for the user’s and visitor’s convenience. 

Detailed content has been created for your convenience to help you learn various techniques that can be implemented to increase upload size of files, or themes, or plugins on your website. Indeed, this is a great avenue to achieve an high level of optimization of your website on WordPress.

So, let’s dive in!

The Importance of upgrading the uploadable size of your website

And before we dive into the main cause of action, let’s take a look at the various reasons as to why it is required though not mandatory to increase the size limit in WordPress.

The varieties of files that can be uploaded on WordPress makes it a great avenue to deliver consistent content to your readers or audience. This is obstructed by the limitation fixed on the uploadable file size on the site. 

On WordPress, there are varying methods that users can employ in their individual strategies. Therefore, if your line of work requires you to upload high-resolution pictures or videos directly to your website, then you might have to consider increasing your upload size. 

Yet this is not mandatory. If you are fine with the allocated upload size on your website then you do not need to change it. Or if your site does not require uploading large files or so on your site. 

It should be noted that even though it is not mandatory, it is advisable because you would attain a better experience upon that. 

The main reason why there’s a limit is to avoid the website from being over jammed or to prevent a server’s time out. Regardless, the restriction may prevent you from uploading themes, plugins, or other files that exceed the size given to you on your website. 

Therefore it is essential for you to increase the max upload size of your website.

Importances

1. Maximize the little to nothing allocated size on your WordPress website. Although, a big part of it is due to your host provider and the host plans. 
2. Strengthen your connection with your reader or audience with more in-depth content such as files, themes, and plugins. With a larger file size, you have wider possibilities
3. .For installing a plugin or theme on WordPress, you might need a large upload size for better uploading and to avoid errors or issues.
4. For a better user experience, you might consider increasing your max upload size. This however entails not just you as the user but also your site’s visitors.
5. Also, if your site is about selling digital files, a larger upload size would be better and more feasible for you.

These reasons are however subjective. You as a person may have other individual reasons why you need to increase the max upload size of your website. But the bottom line of all the reasons is to inform you of the essentiality of increasing it because of the restriction. 

Various mechanisms to employ to check the max upload size in WordPress

So, before deciding on whether or not you would want to increase the max upload size of your website, then you should at least know the particular upload size of your website. 

On a normal basis, the max upload size of all WordPress most times ranges between 4 MB to 128 MB. Therefore, your website upload size would fall between those numbers. Your host provider has a major role to play in the upload size allocated to your website, therefore, you should ensure you pick the best web host provider. 

This is why it is essential to carefully choose one’s host. You have to strategically examine the host you consider and choose it because of its performance and support. It is unsafe to nonchalantly pick out a host without a full examination of how much this host can help your site. 

In Addition, it also depends on your hosting plan. Whether you seek out a big or small plan, it also affects your upload size because the plan feature is the host’s decision to make.

How to check the upload size of your WordPress Site

Now, to the order of the day, if you want to check the upload size of your website, you should move to your Admin Area of your WordPress, select the ‘Media’. Select ‘Add New’. From there you should be able to see the upload size of your website.

You can either select ‘Add New’ seen on the smaller page at the side or from the larger page. Both lead to the same goal but if you select the one on the larger page, it is done in a way to help you upload files from your system. 

Either way, you should be able to see the max upload size of your website. 

You can also selectively check it through the site health page. It is also quite simple. You would simply move into the info page of the site health of your website. From there, you should be able to sight ‘Media Handling’. Click on it and you should be able to view your site’s max upload size.

Study the image to understand more.

Best Practices to employ to increase the max upload size in WordPress

There are some easy ways you can employ to help you up the upload size of your website. The size limit in WordPress can be said to be an obstacle to numerous users whose basics of creating the website in the first place is to share contents that are large sized. They are however obstructed by WordPress restrictions.

However, these are three simple and easy ways to help you increase the upload size of your website. This is categorized from others because it is simple and easy to implement. The other ways you can achieve this involve the use of codes and other technical things. 

You should be able to apply the highlighted ways to achieve a higher upload size for your website. It is also advisable to take on this method before moving on to the ones involving codes and other technical aspects. Though you do not have to strictly follow this, you just have to figure out the one that works for you.

So let’s begin!

Contact your web host provider 

This can be said to be an easier alternative to increasing the upload size of your website. You can easily contact your host provider, state your issues to them, and allow them to proffer a solution to it. They should have the means to solve this. We advise that this should be done first before you begin with other technical alternatives.

And by chance, if you don’t have a hosting provider, you can look up the best web host providers for WordPress on their official website. 

The host you choose can go a long way in creating an impact on your site either positively or negatively. So ensure you choose one that suits your website needs or requirements. 

Multisite 

This entails managing multiple sites with just a single WordPress installation. This type of website is made easy to fix the upload size issue because it allows WordPress to run the site individually on the same installation but performs quite efficiently. 

Although, these sites would have their own media repository but they all share the same resource. 

Here, all you have to do is navigate through the Admin Area, into Network > Settings.

You should be able to see the ‘Max upload file size’

There you can easily change the numbers in the box. 

It should be noted however that you can not exceed the allocated upload size stated by the server of your website. It has to be within what is already stipulated. This method proves useful when you have an upload size lower than that allocated to your website.

Use of FTP/SFTP

You can upload large files directly to your WordPress website using FTP/SFTP. This is a very helpful tool that allows users to upload files from the system to the server or download files from the server to the system, and other useful implements.

So, you can also utilize the use of FTP/SFTP to help upload a large file to your website. Although we do recommend the use of SFTP because it is more secure. 

Another alternative to FTP/SFTP is the Add From Server Plugin. This is in case of any circumstances that prevent you from using FTP/SFTP.

Use of plugins 

This is a great alternative to the use of code or programming languages to change the upload size of your website. They are quite efficient but they require strategic steps, to the extent that if it is not installed or operated rightly, it might not just work for you.

There are numerous WordPress plugins created to help increase the upload size. Some examples are; Upload Larger Plugins, Tuxedo Big File Uploads, and so on.

However, we are going to take on the Increase Max Upload Filesize plugin. It is highly recommended because of its effectiveness. 

To use this plugin, you have to search and install it by navigating through your WordPress Dashboard, then Plugins, and lastly Add New. 

Search for the plugin afterward.

When found, install and activate correctly.

Open the plugin and change the number given which represents your website upload size.

After the change, don’t forget to save the modification.

It’s really that simple. 

Techniques that can be utilized to increase the max upload size of your website in WordPress

We’ve discussed the basics of this content and also stipulated some easier ways in which you can apply to your site in order to solve the upload size issue. However, there are times whereby you may come across a mulish case or a troublesome host. At this point, none of the preceding alternatives would do any good to you. You can therefore apply these technical methods. 

Although these methods are technical in nature, they do not require special technical knowledge to understand it. And this guide has been created as detailed as possible. So all you have to do is read, understand, and apply the practices to your website. Most even involve just copying the code to your website. 

So sit back and apply the ones practicable to your website and ensure you follow them appropriately to attain your desired result.

1. Use of .htaccess files 

Many of us might not be familiar with this but .htaccess is like the stronghold of your website. It basically controls your website performance and it acts as a channel to communicate with your host provider.

And you can also use this channel to increase the max upload size of your website in WordPress.  

However, you have to make sure that your server is utilizing Apache. You have to also ensure that the PHP of your website is in Apache mode as well.

Therefore, you can copy these codes and add them to the .htaccess file of your website.

To do this, you have to connect your server through an FTP client and locate the WordPress installation file. Afterward, you would open up .htaccess through a notepad and then paste the copied codes. However, ensure that you’ve made hidden files visible because .htaccess is a hidden file.

You can edit the code numbers, fix your desired numbers to the one suitable for your website. You should note that number (4) or (5) is quoted in seconds, so you have to decide which is preferable to your site. 

This techniques are a way of attaining WordPress Optimization.

2. Use of Nginx

Nginx, like Apache, is a web server that is variously utilized for performance optimization in WordPress. So you can also implement the use of Nginx to increase the upload size of your website. These procedures may however vary depending on the host server you are using on your site.

So for this step, it would require you to search for your php.ini file in the Nginx server. Modify the upload max file size and the post max file size to your desired size and save the modification. 

Afterward, in the Nginx. conf file, you need to modify the max upload file as well. You need to set this appropriately at the location, server, and http.

Save modification and restart Nginx to apply changes.

You can employ this code to reload – sudo service nginx reload

3. Make changes to your php.ini file 

This is also a great technique to allow you to increase the max upload size of your website. This technique works great for different users and it’s simple to apply. 

Now, all you have to do is search for the php.ini file in your root directory. You can utilize the use of a file manager in your host’s dashboard at the c-panel to help search for it. Or as an alternative, you can use FTP/SFTP. 

Search for the file, and if not found, you can create another php.ini file.

However, the way it goes, add this code to the file; 

upload_max_filesize = 10M

post_max_size = 10M

max_execution_time = 300

Copy and add these codes to it. And you can try out 64M instead as an alternative. 

4.  Make use of user.ini files

 Sometimes, you might not be able to achieve the desired result with the phi.ini files. There are times where your server configures your website to take cognizance of user.ini files rather than phi.ini files.

However, both require the same process for an increase in the max upload size in WordPress.

Locate the user.ini file in your root directory. Employ the use of FPT or the file manager app of your host’s c panel dashboard. 

If you are unable to locate it, then you can create a user.ini file. 

Add these codes to it

As seen, the code and process are similar to that of phi.ini. 

This method has proven to be quite useful to individuals that employ this method. Therefore, endeavor to follow it systematically and appropriately. 

5. Make changes with the use of WordPress themes to increase max upload size

If it’s more comfortable for you, you can increase the max upload size in WordPress by changing your theme. Doing so would change the value of the current upload size of your website into a default value. Then you would add these codes to the functions.php of your theme.

You can set it to your preferred size from the code. However, it goes, ensures the code is inputted correctly to the functions.php file of your WordPress theme to change the upload size of your website.

How to confirm the max upload size of your website after applying the given techniques.

After taking up any of these techniques, you can check and confirm if the technique was successfully implemented on your website. For this, you would have to follow the same procedure as explained before. Move into the Media Library of your website dashboard in WordPress.

Confirm if it has been successfully changed.

If it has, congratulations to you then. You can unrestrictedly upload files, or themes, or plugins as you please. This entails that although there is still a limitation as to things you can upload on the site you have a wider spectrum than the previous size.

However, if not successful, you can try out other techniques which you have not tried out and apply them accordingly on your website.

Conclusion 

These are the varying ways you can increase the max upload size of your website on WordPress. These distinct ways can be tasking and perhaps difficult to apply accordingly, so you have to figure out which you could work on and apply it on your website appropriately. 

As earlier stated, the reason why there’s a limitation in the first place is to prevent issues that could reduce WordPress optimization of websites and ensure that WordPress distinct features satisfy user’s needs and also user’s convenience. 

Therefore we can say that WordPress is a Versatile Content Management System that provides extendable features that can be easily harnessed by the user for various individual reasons. Even the WordPress Community is a great avenue to seek answers to any issue related to WordPress that you require to be solved. 

Image optimization? Do you really need this?

For most of us, the images become an afterthought once they’re on the website, but they shouldn’t be.

You can have the most beautiful and valuable content in the world but if you are doing wrong with the images, your websites will fail to impress the audiences. Images are extremely important to break the content into chunks and make the whole story more readable.

Using the images correctly can capture users’ attention and keep them hold throughout the content. On the flip side, using many unoptimized images in the web page will only ruin your website by making it load slow.

Fortunately, WordPress makes it easy for you to handle image optimization by providing tons of image optimization plugins. The plugin does all the work to make sure all the images are optimized.

I have come up with a list of best image optimization plugins that work excellent to optimize bulky images and are my favorite plugins. Have a look at the list and enjoy the details.

Before we get into the list, let’s understand a few things regarding WordPress image optimization.

What Is Image Optimization?

Image optimization means working on your images to make it better in terms of specific criteria like image dimension, image size, resolution, format, and attributes.

Optimizing image help your website load faster and provide an improved user experience to the visitors.

Why Is Image Optimization Important?

By optimizing the images on your website, you will tremendously improve the user experience of your website. The main advantage of having optimized images are: 

• It improves the page load time
• Improves user experience of your site
• Good for SEO as it improves ranking
• Reduce the load on the server
• Boosts conversion 

Top 6 Image Optimization Plugin for WordPress

Imagify

Imagify allows you to achieve lighter images without losing the original quality. One of the most advanced plugins for WordPress image optimization, this tool auto optimizes the image on upload.

Why Use Imagify?

If you already have many bulky images on your website that are unoptimized, Imagify auto-optimizes all of them in just a single click. This helps you save time in optimizing the image manually.

The plugin has three levels of compression.

• Lossless compression: retains the quality 
• Aggressive compression: small loss in the image quality ( usually unnoticeable) 
• Ultra compression: Most advanced compression with some reduction in the image quality, but performs better.  

Using the plugin is free if you make up to 1GB uploads per month. If you think you are going to have more than 1 GB of image uploads in a month, you can opt for the pro plant that starts with $4.99/month

Smush

Smush is an award-winning plugin that has been tested and benchmarked for speed and quality. It is one of the most loved plugins in the WordPress community. 

Smush is the easiest way to optimize the images without visibly degrading the image quality. 

Why Use Smush?

Turn on lazy load, resize and compress image, optimize image, and significantly reduce the page loading time using this free image smusher.

• compress without a visible decline in the image quality
• Enable lazy load to create a better user experience
• Compress a bulk of images in a click (up to 50). 
•  Optimize the images that are not in the media library. This plugin smushes the directory images as well. 
• Works with Gutenberg block
• Compatible with all the popular themes. 

Smush is also a better choice in that it lets you optimize unlimited images for free. But the red flag comes in when your size exceeds 1 MB. Also, the free version offers only lossless compression.

Compress JPEG & PNG Images

The TinyPNG plugin comes with a spotless dashboard and is extremely easy to set up an optimization setting. This plugin automatically optimizes your images upon upload.

Why Use Smush?

• Automatically optimized images upon upload
• No file size limit 
• Optimize all the bulky images in your media library
• Compatible with WooCommerce
• Optimize and resize uploads with the WordPress mobile app

There is no limit to the file size and supports WooCommerce. Looks pretty captivating. You are allowed to make up to 500 uploads per month for free. 

ShortPixel Image Optimization

ShortPixel is a free easy to use image compression plugin. This is another excellent install-and-forget plugin that takes care of all the images on your website. 

ShortPixel compresses all the previously uploaded images and scales new images automatically upon upload.

The plugin is compatible with the gallery, slider, and eCommerce plugin and works well for pdf compression. 

The plugin setting dashboard have clean interface and is easy to use.

Why Use ShortPixel:

• Popular plugin with more than 200000 active installs
• Suitable for image and pdf compression
• Optimizes any images on your website, including the gallery and slider ones. 
• Can skip the images that are already optimized. 
• Works great for eCommerce websites using WooCommerce
• Cloudflare integration

You can get 100 free image uploads per month and no file size restriction for an individual image. Anything more than this will cost you 4.99 per month up to 5000 images.

WP Compress

WP Compress is an all in one optimizer. it is a complete image optimization plugin that shrinks the file size of the images to improve load time and boost conversion 

WP compress runs on autopilot. Link your website, and you are good to go.

Why Use WP Compress

• The plugin is loaded with agency features.
• local and live optimization mode availability
• delivers perfect image every time
• convert and generate WebP images
• ultrafast CDN
• automated image resizing 
• one click bulk optimization
• downloadable pdf report for agencies
• detailed compression report

OPtimole

Optimole is a next-level image optimization plugin loaded with tons of ultra-modern features. These plugins run on autopilot to fully automate the image optimization process.

Install and activate the plugin, and you are done. The plugin can help you achieve up to 80% compression without letting degrade the images’ quality. 

Why Use Optimole

Optimole is entirely cloud-based and does not create load on your server.

• Picks the right size for the visitor’s browser
• The plugins serve the image via the fast image CDN 
• Use lazy loading to display images. 
• Compatible with page builders 
• Retina images and WebP supported

All the images are generated in real-time. They are not stored in the WordPress database. 

The plugin is free to use for a website with up to 5000 monthly visitors. Beyond that, it costs you $22.52 up to 25000 monthly visitors. 

How Image Optimization Plugin Can Help Your Website Load Faster?

Well! First, let’s understand how the images can make your site load slower. Images are always more extensive than the plain text. This means they take a bit longer time to load compared to plain text. If your images are not correctly optimized, they can make your site load slow.

However, the image takes longer than text to load does not mean that you should use only text in your content and avoid images.

Instead, you should use images in such a way that they are served on your website in a much faster way. You can do this by using different image optimizing tools that are mentioned above.

How To Know If You need Image Optimization Plugin?

Before you go for an image optimization check, I suggest you check the site speed to see if your site is loading at an average pace. If your site is taking longer than the average load time, the unoptimized images can be one reason for this.

My favorite tool for checking the site speed in Gtmetrix.

You can also use the tools like Dotcom tools & Pingdom

Here I performed the Gtmetrix speed test for a blog page. The page load time here is 7.8 sec ( higher than average load time) which is not bad for which unoptimized images can be one of the reasons.

What next?

Now I will install a WordPress image compression plugin to optimize the image for the website automatically.

My favorite image optimization plugin here will be Smush.

This plugin will automatically optimize the image during the upload and optimize all the old images in bulk.

Now I performed the new speed test again( not the Re-Test ) to see if that made any impact on the page loading time

The page’s speed is now reduced to 5.8sec from 7.1 sec after the plugin was activated.

This is how the use of a plugin can help you load the WordPress website faster by optimizing images using image optimization plugins.